Can video for B2B make the difference in your marketing strategy? If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much is a video worth? Using video for B2B marketing is highly valuable yet creating great content is not that easy. But don’t despair, the following...
If you've been blogging for a while, you remember that thrilling moment when you realize someone is actually reading what you're writing. Maybe a few comments appear. Perhaps your blog URL gets retweeted by a kind friend. Or maybe yours just went viral all of a sudden.
For me, blogging has been a slow burn. Being syndicated has helped grow my blog traffic, but for me the moment came the first time I realized I had a "fan." That's also the exact time when I began to struggle with authenticity. I started pandering for traffic and stopped writing from the heart. I forgot my mission in the pursuit of popularity. And like all bloggers, I had to learn the ultimate lesson. Your writing has to be authentic to survive. I had lost my authentic voice.
In hindsight it was a great lesson. The more I forget about pleasing people, the more popular my blog gets. When I think about it there were several signs that I missed along the road to fakiness. Hopefully you can learn from this hindsight and avoid making the same mistakes I did.
Here is a checklist to make sure you're being authentic in your own work. More than a couple yes answers to these questions might be a red flag that your authenticity could be suffering:
Online promotion and customer activity tracking have changed the face of marketing forever, that's a given. As a result of this I'm seeing some disturbing trends in digital marketing including a strong bias against elements of marketing that have always packed a powerful punch. Every day there's a new digital "expert" telling me that numbers don't lie. Or that I need to add a tactic within my marketing strategy that is counter-intuitive to the overall plan, mainly because another digital marketing campaign found success using that tactic.
I'm grateful to have the pleasure of working with true geniuses in the field of digital marketing. Here are three things really great digital marketers all understand about integrated marketing:
1. Numbers are only half the story. Anyone who's done a ton of A/B testing will tell you there are some really weird subject lines and promotions that take off like a rocket. And we don't always know why. Great digital marketers know you have to throw in a few wild cards, particularly at the beginning of the campaign, because what the numbers will tell you will work, isn't always what works. Numbers, plus experience and a bit of gut feel or intuition will always give you the best result.
2. Traditional media is still relevant. A lot of folks on the digital side look down their nose at print, network TV, direct marketing and other forms of traditional advertising and PR. Great digital marketers know that the best results (and this holds true for my IMC campaigns as well) result when there is an attempt to create synergy between digital tactics and traditional media. It may not be as glamorous as content marketing right now, but a good hit on local TV will always deliver for consumer brands. Learn how to synchronize digital tactics with these efforts, and they can provide a tremendous boost for online results.
"Let's turn customers' shopping carts into improvised videos." It's an idea so brilliantly quirky as to border on insane - but Jet.com's one-day branding spectacular is one of the best examples of integrated marketing communications in action I've seen recently.
The premise of the campaign, called #JetSpree, was simple but groundbreaking. One day only, during predefined hours, Jet.com asked shoppers for permission to turn their shopping carts into what they called "on-the-spot video." In essence, their purchases would be used as the inspiration for videos involving double dutch jump roping, a barbershop quartet, pantomime, yodeling, improv comedy, dancing toys and even a turtle. The videos were then shared on YouTube and social media during the event.
By Dina Ely
I recently had the “pleasure” of having to update approximately 60 business local listings for a client across the Google and Yahoo local business networks, and what I experienced working with both companies on this was an eye-opener. In the end, I think I've figured out why Google will always trump Yahoo, and how out of touch Yahoo is with the needs of small and medium businesses. (Marissa Mayer, take note - there are a few things I think you've forgotten since the Google days.)
For this grand adventure I worked in the dashboards of both sites as well as extensively on the phone with support. Let me compare and contrast the overall experience and discuss a few takeaways.
Yahoo
Both Google and Yahoo play an important role in local search (as do a few other players – but that's another post for another time). Google is used more by customers in local searches, but to ignore Yahoo altogether would be foolhardy. Especially since Yahoo, like Google, offers free business listings. What they also offer, and pretty much give you no choice but to use, is a variety of subscription-based services including Localworks, which starts at $29.99/month per listing.
Here's where I hit my first road block. In order to do anything substantial with these 60 some odd listings, I really had no choice but to pay for a Localworks package just to get a fully-featured version of the marketing dashboard. If you try to go the free route, the tools available to you are minimal and it's virtually impossible to do anything on the kind of scale I needed. I claimed and prepared to edit every outdated listing, but everything came to a grinding halt when I hit the log jam of verification postcards. (This will come up with Google too, in just a minute.)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research placed the value of a video at 1.8 million words in, "How Video Will Take Over the World." While this may be surprising to you, most big brands fully embrace the concept and use video marketing to its fullest potential, and small businesses need to take notes. Continue reading to learn more.
The Big List has arrived - the one that'll help you make sense of which online marketing tools are right for your company. John Lincoln at Marketing Land has done the hard work of reviewing 80 of the hottest tools for SEO, social media and digital...
Seventy-one percent of marketers will increase their spending on content marketing this year, according to recent Curata report. The report, which surveyed 500 industry professionals, found that best-in-class marketing campaigns rely on a predominance of 65 percent original content, supplemented by curated and syndicated material. The payoff is tangible, with 62 percent of companies reporting that content marketing improves both their quantity and quality of leads.
But creating content costs money, a reality reflected in Gartner's finding that small businesses will spend 10 percent more on digital marketing this year. If you're just starting to promote your business via content marketing, your budget is probably limited—making it imperative you develop a cost-efficient strategy for funding your initial promotional push.
